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It is with great anger that I say they're doing it again. Indeed, they never stopped.
https://biosafetynow.substack.com/p/you-couldnt-make-body-bags-fast-enough
They're making super dangerous airborne diseases in ferrets... For no good reason at all. Would this be dangerous for people? Who knows? You'd have to test it which is ethically and logically even more dangerous. So there is no value to this research. All we know is that 'this specific disease could be super dangerous' and they helpfully put its genome up on the internet.
If the disease is dangerous to humans like it is for ferrets and does leak out, then we're in for COVID with huge lethality rates, 30% rather than a measly 0.3%.
I think there is a real blindspot about people's motivations that many don't fully appreciate. There were all these conspiracy theories going around about how COVID was a US bioweapons attack against China or Iran, a plot to shackle everyone with vaccines... But so far as I can tell nobody had anything to gain besides publishing some 'good' papers. These scientists were just doing science with complete disdain for the risks. They were going out to caves to gather these coronaviruses and bring them to Wuhan. Daszak/Ecohealth were using humanized mice (mice that behave immunologically like humans) to assess pandemic potential of bat coronaviruses. They wanted to insert some furin cleavage sites too.
Then we get a virus in Wuhan. It's closest ancestor was from Laos. How did it get to Wuhan? In a truck. How did Covid get so good at infecting people? It was engineered, with those humanized mice. How did it get that weird furin cleavage site? Artificially.
And naturally the Wuhan virology database disappears due to 'hacking attempts' just before this virus is released. So nobody quite knows what viruses they were working with... Ironically this completely undoes even the silly scientific angle, they made all this effort to make a database of viruses and then conceal it forever due to 'hacking'.
And none of this is even helpful in any serious way! Who cares? The amount of super-dangerous viruses that could possibly exist is beyond measure. At least with AI there are some positive usecases.
Claude choked up even thinking and researching about this stuff that human scientists are getting paid to do. They keep doing it, there is no sign that they've stopped, even after the last lab leak killed tens of millions of people and made a huge inconvenience for everyone on the planet, they somehow persuaded everyone it was low-class to conspiracize about it. Everyone was just supposed to get over the experts bringing us Torment Nexus 1, Torment Nexus 2, 3 and 4 are still in the works (funded by taxpayers). The experts find that the experts were not to blame, there was some bat pangolin farce instead. They'll do it again unless stopped. GOF bioresearchers delenda est.
The paper you're citing is 12 years old. Although I guess you're directionally correct in that you could probably find papers published by someone in the academy that you would call GoF.
I don't follow Dr. Perez or the field, but amusingly he was on a paper last year describing a safe platform for doing the kind of work you're talking about.
You might disagree with them, you may be so cynical as to believe that scientists only care about publishing some 'good' papers, but I can guarantee that most people doing this kind of work believe they're making the world a better place. They believe in a future free from infectious disease. Try some mistake theory and charity for a change.
Yeah, well, I don't. Their whole field of study needs to be nixed and made illegal.
That's a bit excessive; just postpone gain-of-function research until they've gotten
the Big Falcon RocketStarship working, and then put it in a distant orbit.Antarctic research station should be sufficient, no?
I'm sure there's at least one disaster novel or movie about a frozen disease being thawed and killing everyone.
Aren't some of the known Spanish Flu gene sequences from exhumed victims in polar regions? I don't think we have any other source for that data.
Yeah, but Spanish Flu wouldn't do much nowadays, most likely (not that I'd care to test that). Its descendants have been circulating as seasonal flus ever since. You'd need something much older or from an isolated population.
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